The Mystery of the Online Community

Contents

Though there are a lot of social networks, newsgroups, forums, and club-like Web sites on the Internet and Web, these entities are not true communities, although many purport to be. Worse, they are often peopled with phonies and posers who see the whole thing as an elaborate video game.

At best, what you have are loose associations that are tenuous, fickle, and probably self-destructive. These sorts of artificial communities are houses of cards in most instances. They are fake.

I've always been concerned about these fake communities ever since watching one fall apart back in the early 1980s, when the online system called The Source was still in business. Within The Source, there was an early online community experiment called Participate, which was shortened to Parti. It was a classic online community that looked and functioned just like a real community, only everyone who participated was online. Because it was online, numerous people fictionalized themselves because they could do it so easily.

As in today's online communities, people may or may not fictionalize themselves. I like the term self-fictionalization, because it is derived from self-realization, a New Age quasi-religious construct. If you think about it, a self-realized person (assuming we kind of know what that means: self-aware, honest with oneself) could be the person who would fictionalize oneself. After all, you know who you are, so be whom you want to be!

So within any online community, a certain percentage of the participants are out-and-out fakes. I would argue that within some communities the number is higher than 50 percent. The interpersonal dishonesty and fantasizing do not make for any sort of real community. Most of the destructive force within any online community comes from this large group of fakes who see the community as something of a video-arcade adventure game where the user can go in and stir up trouble, then leave.

Because of this, you have to rethink online communities if you actually want them to be maintained and grow over time. How do you do this?

First, you can take a look at some successful initiatives and see what makes them work. In this situation, you want to find a mechanism that is aging well. Thus I must exclude recent phenomena such as Digg, YouTube, Stickam, and perhaps even Facebook as too new to be fully understandable.

Let's instead look at five distinctly different quasi-community sites and what has made them succeed over the long term. I'll try to pick very different concepts. The five successes worth deconstructing are MetaFilter, Slashdot, LinkedIn, Flickr, and AVforums.com.Continue reading >

John Dvorak is a columnist for PCMag.com and the host of the weekly TV video podcast CrankyGeeks. His work is licensed around the world. Previously a columnist for Forbes, Forbes Digital, PC World, Barrons, MacUser, PC/Computing, Smart Business and other magazines and newspapers. Former editor and consulting editor for Infoworld. Has appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, Philadelphia Enquirer, SF Examiner, Vancouver Sun. Was on the start-up team for CNet TV as well as ZDTV. At ZDTV (and TechTV) was host of Silicon...
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